A French woman was left stunned this week when she was barred from boarding a Swiss airlines flight to New York from Geneva airport after being told she was blacklisted. The reason, she says, is the name on her passport, Alic Aïda, which when pronounced (wrongly) can sound like Al Qaeda.

Labrador retrievers remain the most popular kind of dog owned in Switzerland, according to statistics for 2013 but the most newly sought after species is a breed that is tiny by comparison — the Chihuahua.